Hey there! My name is Dameon, and I’m the technical director around here at PokerTableRatings.com. I spend most of my time working on the behind the scenes technology that keeps things moving seamlessly, but I also have quite of bit of involvement in the front end stuff as well. In response to the avalanche of e-mails from people interested in the technology behind PokerTableRatings.com I’ve decided to start a technical blog, the Tech Corner! In this blog I’ll periodically go over some of the challenges we’re facing, or even just give a sneak-peak into our operations.

I thought for my first blog I’d start with the heart and soul of our operations, the database. The database is what holds all of the information that is extracted from raw hand histories about players and hands themselves. It is what powers the PokerTableRatings.com player search.

The database isn’t actually any single database, as of this moment it consists of 6 database nodes. For those that are curious, the nodes servers have dual quad core Intel Xeon processors, 32 gb of memory, and a varying amount of disk space between 1.4TB and as much as 14TB configured in raid-10 arrays.

New data that comes in is spread over the database nodes that are currently active for writing. As a node starts to fill up, writing is turned off and it becomes a read only node. Reading is done via a custom application we call the “balancer,” which transparently queries all of the nodes at the same time and assembles the data into a single response.  There will be a blog in the future which goes into more detail about the balancer, as it is a very interesting piece of technology.

This helps explain our recent upgrade which took a few weeks. One of our database nodes became too full before we turned it off as a write node. Since it was so full, even once doing only read work, it still wasn’t fast enough for real time access. So to fix this we had to dump that entire node (about 300 million hands), and reinsert it across 3 new nodes. That was quite a bit of work :) We were also upgrading a few other servers involved in the process, preparing for the launch of the new PokerTableRatings.com.

As you can see, I love my job around here! I’m happy to discuss our technology and answer any questions I can, just shoot me an e-mail at dameon@pokertableratings.com, make a post in the forums, or even comment on this post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 1:22 pm and is filed under PTR News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.